KENYA: Test plots and a new approach to assistance are bringing hope to locals, writes Rob Crillyin Sauri, west AfricaDevelopment economics
If Jennifer Otieno Odera does not feed her six orphaned grandchildren, no one else will.
She drags her frail, ageing frame across the half-acre plot of land that provides all their food, flicking her jembe - a home-made hoe - across the ground as she goes. Weeds begin to accumulate beside the tall stems of maize.
"I have lived through hardship," she says in the language of her Luo tribe.
"In years when the maize did not grow well, we would just have to go hungry. There was nothing else we could do."
Fat ears of maize hang from the stalks that tower above her. This year, her family will not go hungry. She is benefiting from a unique experiment in development economics.
Her remote village - Sauri in western Kenya - has become a test plot where Jeffrey Sachs, an international economist and adviser to the United Nations, puts his theories to the test.
As G8 leaders prepare to meet at Gleneagles next week to discuss how to lift Africa out of poverty, the debate over the impact of aid is being played out for real in Sauri.
If the experiment works, it will send a clear message to the developed world that huge injections of aid can quickly lift people like Mrs Odera out of poverty. Failure will send Tony Blair and his Commission for Africa back to the drawing board.
The village was selected for its location in one of the poorest regions on the planet. Its 5,000 residents earn about 30 pence a day on average. Villagers eat their food uncooked when they cannot afford the firewood to make a simple maize porridge. Almost a quarter of the population is infected with HIV.
Mrs Otieno - who does not know her age, only that she was married in 1952 - insists her two sons and their wives did not die of the "dreaded disease". But like many of her generation, she finds herself having to care for a second set of children.
"The whole world has forgotten us but now I am very happy that the project has come here," she says, sitting in a threadbare armchair amid the bare concrete walls of her home.
Sauri is the first of 10 "millennium villages" that Prof Sachs and his team at Columbia University, New York, selected for the test. If his theory is right, the village could be set on course to meet the United Nations Millennium Development Goals - a basic set of social and health indicators - for $110 (€91) for each person each year.
Scale it up across the country and Kenya could be catapulted up the development ladder for $1.5 billion - too much for Sauri or the Kenyan government but affordable for the international community, argues Prof Sachs in his most recent book, The End of Poverty. In its first year, the project has distributed mosquito nets to every Sauri household, repaired dilapidated water sources and paid for a Nissan pick-up which will serve as an ambulance-cum-delivery truck.
Villagers have built a new clinic and the government has promised to provide a doctor, replacing one who left a decade ago. Mrs Otieno and the other farmers have been given fertiliser and shown how to plant their seeds most effectively.
The result is that the maize grows tall and green. Bean shoots pierce the soil between maize stalks, pumping valuable nitrogen back into soil that has emptied of nutrients during two centuries of continuous cultivation.
Sauri's farmers may have a little extra maize to sell at market for the first time in years.
"It is so different," Mrs Odera says. "It will mean I can buy clothes for the children and medicine if they are sick."
Patrick Mutuo, a Kenyan soil scientist who heads the project, said development programmes addressing single issues such as water, education or malaria, would always be hampered by other stumbling blocks.
"These problems are solvable. From the G8 we only need the investment bit of it."
The theory has won celebrity backing. Bono wrote the foreword to The End of Poverty and Tomb Raider star Angelina Jolie paid a secret visit to Sauri in May.
But in Kenya, development experts are sceptical that a single village can serve as a model for the whole country. What happens when the project ends after five years? Will farmers be earning enough to buy fertiliser to replace the donated stocks?
David Ndii, an influential economist, describes the experiment as "naive". Money and technical know-how are not the problem in Kenya, he says, but governance. Throwing foreign aid at the problem simply enforces the belief that the solutions to Africa's problems cannot be found at home. "We should get off that particular bandwagon," he adds.
Joshua Olunga (52) is just finishing his morning's work. The grandfather of three has spent two hours stumbling through elephant grass and bogs.
He clutches a GPS system which he is using to help map the sprawling farmsteads that make up Sauri. Without an accurate map there can be no new roads or drains.
The millennium villages project, he says, has replaced despair with hope for the future. "That's what I'm fighting for, the future of my grandchildren."